Hello, friends. This might be a sporadic observation and pointless on my part, so I'm hoping some of you may have insights I haven't considered yet.

I've noticed an erratic use of directional 'looking' tags (in particular "looking away" and "looking aside"). This seems to be due to a lack of clarification on whether the 'looking' tags are describing head directions, eye directions, or both; leading to a situation where combinations of the tags are used haphazardly to describe any configuration of the two. For reference, here are the descriptions of each tag:

Looking Away
Looking away is where a character's body is facing one way, however their head/eyes is looking at another direction. This does not mean they can't be looking at something/someone, just that they are not looking where their body is facing.

Looking Aside
Used for posts depicting a character looking to the left or right.

As you can see there are overlaps in these descriptions. For example, a subject may have their head turned to the left while also looking in that direction, thus fulfilling requirements for both tags while also qualifying for either individually. There is a distinct lack of mutual exclusivity, but no suggestion of hierarchy as with most other tags.

To be clear, this isn't the only example. Similar situations arise with other 'looking' tags. This particular scenario is just the most obvious.

What are your thoughts? How are you using these tags?

After considering it further I'm left with the conclusion that "looking away" is for when the subject is engaging with something (for example, looking at another subject, a tree, a sunset), while "looking aside" is reserved for the act of looking away without directed focus (such as when a subject looks to the left or right out of embarrassment). Still open to comments, just theorizing.

sparklepaws said:
After considering it further I'm left with the conclusion that "looking away" is for when the subject is engaging with something (for example, looking at another subject, a tree, a sunset), while "looking aside" is reserved for the act of looking away without directed focus (such as when a subject looks to the left or right out of embarrassment). Still open to comments, just theorizing.

if that's the case, it may be needed to re-alias looking_left and looking_right, which are aliased to looking_away